Joanna J. Bryson — Professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School Berlin (previously University of Bath) — is among the clearest skeptical voices against ascribing rights or moral status to robots. Her provocatively titled essay Robots Should Be Slaves (2010) formulates the counter-position to the relational and information-ethical line (Coeckelbergh, Floridi).
Key Contribution
Bryson’s thesis: robots are and remain tools. They should be consistently treated as such — legally, ethically, and linguistically. The title does not aim at slavery as a relation of injustice — that presupposes personal subjects — but precisely designates the relation: complete ownership, complete disposal, complete responsibility of the owner.
Bryson’s concern: the anthropomorphization of robots (above all social companion robots, humanoid forms, AI assistants) has two dangerous consequences. First, it relieves the human beings who develop and deploy machines of responsibility for their effects. Second, it relativizes the rights of real persons by extending rights to non-persons — and thereby inflates the category of person.
Significance for the Ontology of the Person
Bryson’s position converges with the ontology of the person on a decisive point: dignity belongs to persons — not to systems that simulate person-behavior. Her warning that anthropomorphization leads to an oblivion of the person in two directions (humanizing the machine, mechanizing the human being) is an AI-ethical parallel to Spaemann’s central thesis of the difference between someone and something.
Where Bryson connects with the ontology of the person — and where she works in a different idiom: Bryson justifies her position functionally, from the protection of real human interests and the coherence of legal attribution. The ontology of the person shares the practical result, but reads it as the consequence of a deeper-lying distinction: persons are not highly developed tools, and tools cannot become persons — because Prote Energeia is not a functional feature, but a mode of being. Her argumentation can therefore be deepened in its justification by the substance-ontological-relational concept of person without changing its practical consequences.
Place in the Book
Bryson is a contemporary witness for the position that the book unfolds systematically: person-behavior without personhood is indeed possible — and even ever more frequent —, but it constitutes no right and no dignity. She stands close to the ontology of the language of personhood without sharing it; her practical-political recommendations are easily reconstructible from there.
See also
- AI Ethics
- Artificial Intelligence
- Humanoid Robot
- Care Robot
- Oblivion of the Person
- Someone
- Dignity
- Relational Concept of Person
- Substance-Ontological-Relational Concept of Person
- Mark Coeckelbergh
- Luciano Floridi
Sources: Bryson, Joanna J. (2010): “Robots Should Be Slaves”. In: Y. Wilks (ed.): Close Engagements with Artificial Companions. John Benjamins, pp. 63–74.
Further sources:
- Bryson, Joanna J. (2018): “Patiency is not a virtue: the design of intelligent systems and systems of ethics”. Ethics and Information Technology 20(1), pp. 15–26.
- Bryson, Joanna J. / Diamantis, Mihailis E. / Grant, Thomas D. (2017): “Of, for, and by the people: the legal lacuna of synthetic persons”. Artificial Intelligence and Law 25(3), pp. 273–291.